Employer Discretion: The Role of Collective Agreements in the Liberalization of Industrial Relations
通过分析荷兰三份集体合同，研究了1970年代以来雇主自由裁量权的增长，发现其随时间与行业变化，且员工民主影响力减弱加剧了雇主单方决策权。
The gradual shift in power relations between organized employers and employees since the 1970s has increasingly affected the functioning of national industrial relations systems. According to a broad literature, the most important of these consequences is an increase in employer discretion. This article tests this claim by performing a longitudinal content analysis on three Dutch collective contracts. It develops an analytical framework based on four dimensions of employer discretion. Results show that although employer discretion did increase on all four dimensions between the mid-1970s and the 2020s, significant temporal and sectoral variation has occurred. In addition, the article argues that a loss of democratic influence by employees intensified the increase of the one-sided decision-making powers of employers, and that the collective contract is being transformed from a joint labor–capital effort to solve workplace problems to a management instrument.